Ep. 380: Josiah Royce on Community (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some folks who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 380 is something like, what is a community? And we read sections of Josiah Royce's the Problem of Christianity from 1913. More information about the text in the podcast please see partiallyexaminelite.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, sundered from the rest of you by chasms of mutual mystery and Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, breeding cooperation at the expense of a loss of interest in the community. In Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, the Mere Gesticulation of a Self in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:43 Kara: This is Kara Barnett and I am speaking from Salt Lake City, Utah.

0:48 Mark: Well, thanks for joining us, Kara. You had recommended Royce to us more than a year ago.

0:55 Kara: It was, I think, seven years ago.

0:57 Mark: Yeah, okay, well that's still technically accurate and we knew that Dylan was going to be go. I was combing through emails of recommendations and I think I was intrigued when you had recommended this guy because we just don't cover a lot of the lesser known pragmatists, I guess, or the American, British Hegelians. We haven't done much of that. And I think this guy falls into both camps. A little bit of Emerson maybe is the closest figure that people would be familiar with.

1:24 Kara: The term that usually gets used with Royce is an absolute pragmatist, which is kind of two terms that seem a little contradictory. He separated himself from the Hegelians and the pragmatists. The other pragmatists were made a little uncomfortable with his discussion of the Absolute, so sometimes sort of distance themselves from him. But absolute pragmatist is what we call him.

1:49 Mark: The selections you had picked out for us in this problem of Christianity are really all about what is a community. And you know, so I was interested in that. Just seeing that from the Hegel perspective. We're going to actually start reading a little more of his phenomenology on the geist and how you could sensibly talk about this sort of super mind, super sensible merging of people without being some sort of weird mystic, because, you know, it's just not the case. Even if you think that as Royce refers to in, in Hindu mysticism or something, oh, I am you, you are me, we are all together, we are.

So this Emerson uber mind, there's very little apart from sort of a strictly religious context that I can make sense of out of that. You certainly can't, as a psychologist, say, well, well, let's talk about what this Ubermind produces, like you could get a little bit of a Jungian or something about it, but this guy is more concerned with actual communities without trying to falsify any of the data. Right. That it is just the case that my consciousness is going to be separate from yours and separate from Wes's, and that's fine. But he says we can still, by having shared goals, shared activities, events in the future, in the past that we sort of regard as a legitimate extension of ourselves.

You know, I sure hope that the world doesn't end. Right. That's an obvious one that would affect all of us. So insofar as we all.

3:14 Wes: I think the hope is that it does end. It just ends in a certain way,

3:17 Kara: but maybe with a bang instead of a whimper.

3:20 Wes: Well, with a resurrection.

3:22 Kara: Yeah. So with Royce and where he's going, that would be different than, you know, let's say like an Ubermind or something like that is for Royce. If coming into this community we lost our individuality, it wouldn't be a community anymore. Like, the idea that we maintain ourselves while joining with others is incredibly important for this. It's not just becoming one sort of blob consciousness. It's a community in the terms of these multiple different commitments, these multiple different loyalties, these multiple different experiences and understandings and interpretations that are joined together in a real way.

4:08 Wes: Just to address Mark, you just highlighted the sense in which a community is some kind of mental entity, according to Royce. And that's where we began in our reading with the Universal Community Section 5. Mark, you highlighted the way in which we share goals or memories. And that's something he does get to later. But the beginning argument I found quite interesting. He has a few different arguments here. One is that we do ascribe these terms to communities that. That are normative, that we might normally reserve for individuals. So, for instance, the community could be evil.

And likewise, there are products of communities like languages, customs, religions, that we couldn't really say the product of any given individual mind, but we do want to think of in a way as mental products. So I thought that was very interesting as well. And these are the ways in which he tries to sort of naturalize and demystify the idea of a community as a collective, as a kind of entity in its own right, and an entity with a mind of its own.

5:13 Mark: So a level of humanity.

5:15 Wes: Yeah. What do we think of those arguments? This, by the way, I'll just say I thoroughly enjoyed this reading and I was kind of excited by very early on by these sorts of arguments. I immediately recommended this to a few people, but I'm not sure what do people think of the arguments themselves.

5:33 Mark: Seth, do you have an opening thought?

5:35 Seth: Seth? I was extremely stimulated and I liked it a lot, and at the same time terrified, because I feel like he's talking about something that's terrifying, but he doesn't seem to think it's terrifying. But, Wes, to kind of like, get to the point you're talking about. He wants to, for lack of a better term, demystify the concept of community. And he wants to do that in two ways. One is he wants to get away from the notion of a mystical community, the Christian community being some kind of mystical union of individuals. And then the second is he doesn't want to have accusations of making some kind of metaphysical claim.

So he analogizes the community with an individual. And he says, you know, essentially a community is an organic form of life in the same way that an individual is just a different. I think he calls it a tier or a grade or something like that. I have to find the quote. But what he wants to say is that a community has. And he spends a lot more time explaining what this looks like further on. But initially he says, you can certainly imagine that if we take a group of people who are doing something together, that entity takes on characteristics, as you said, that we can ascribe or speak of it in the same way that we speak of an individual.

That it has goals, that it has a path, that it accomplishes things, that it's, you know, it's evil or not. And he says, there's a very natural way in which we can do this and we talk about it without it being mystical, without it being positing some kind of substance or, you know, entity that's. It's just simply the social expression of a group of individuals. And he goes on to talk about the social characteristic of human beings and why it's so critical and why, you know, human beings don't exist without community. So I found that plausible. I mean, it's almost a.

I guess he's listed as a pragmatist, but it's also very phenomenological. You know, it's just, hey, this is. This is what we see. Why shouldn't we take it at face value?

7:39 Wes: Well, a skeptic would, of course, say communities don't have thoughts and feelings. Right? It's not a mind in that sense. And this is the kind of problem we typically run into with idealism. A certain kind of idealist would say, well, even a Rock is a mental entity of a sort. And that's just a way of saying, to take the most minimalist view of it, that it's a formal entity, but that doesn't mean it's anything like a human mind. And even Hegel's world mind, it's in some sense mental, but it's not anything like a human mind. So then the question becomes, well, what are we doing with this word mental? Sure, languages and customs and all the rest of it are products of the community. And we might want to call them mental in a sense, but we're using it in a different way than we would use it for a particular human mind.

8:26 Seth: Well, my response to that would be, you know, I use the term entity. I didn't necessarily use the term mental. But I mean, he's trying to find a way to talk about and address the concept of community without having to posit something that it is, that is outside, let's call the realm of lived human experience. And I think he succeeds to some extent in that.

8:50 Wes: Right. So it's supposed to demystify and it's also supposed to be non metaphorical, as he says. So that's a strong claim. If it's not going to be metaphorical anyway, I just bring that objection up because it's going to be the one that most obviously occurs to listeners.

9:04 Mark: We should say a little about the structure of the book and maybe Kara can help us fill out some details here, because I did see some disconnect between the beginning where he introduces this idea of it is a mind, a community is a mind and it is a form of a human mind. It is just a higher grade of a human mind. It's smarter than an individual mind. It can do more things because it has more ingredients going into it. And he says, I'm not just saying this metaphorically. I think this is, you know, this is going to be a literal thing that he argues for in his metaphysics.

And it ends up being very important ethically, as we'll go on to say. It ends up being very important in terms of giving our lives meaning. That not that all communities are good, but if you can be a member of sort of the best kind of community. And this is, you know, the whole thing is about the problem of Christianity. So he thinks that Christianity has a very unique take. Paul in particular has a very unique take on the Christian community as being a universal community that is going to be divine and it's really going to give everybody meaning.

And maybe this is what you meant by scary Seth, that. That if you are really a member of this thing and you say, oh, my own whimsical choices don't matter in comparison to this thing that can root me to something that is truly meaningful and transcendent. And it does. He does start by trying to demystify it, but then he specifically says later, well, there is something mystical and there is something inexplicable how this particular kind of community that is truly wonderful, that is truly lov, Is truly universal, when clearly not everybody has gotten together and joined arms and said, let's be a universal community.

So when you say, I am right now a member of this universal community, you're saying it sort of out of hope, out of projection. You're trying to create this thing by your very belief that does not exist yet. Yeah. Kara, can you give a little more context to that?

10:57 Kara: Yeah. So one of the things that is crucial with thinking about the community and with Royce is that communities are also the places where we have interpretation. So while a community might not be a real mind like an individual human being's mind is, or something like that, what unites them is that communities are where we make our interpretations. Communities are where we make sense of the world around us. And that act of interpretation is the way we understand the world and the way we come to knowledge. So with communities, that's going to be something that kind of is not mystical in some senses, but is also really fundamentally different than other things that we do and fundamentally going to be a part of every aspect of our lives.

12:02 Wes: Yeah, I think maybe to get at these issues, especially the chicken and the egg problem, which I think Mark was alluding to this, the formation of the community becomes an issue later on in our reading. And it's a chicken and egg problem in the sense that a certain type of community, this Christian community, which is genuinely lovable, doesn't become lovable except by people who are devoted and loyal to it, but they can't be truly devoted and loyal to it until it's lovable. So then we get the role of a certain kind of leader and all that stuff. So, yeah, maybe we should just back up and talk this question of individual devotion to the community in Section 6.

12:42 Mark: But, yeah, the disconnect that I was pointing to is just between in these early sections where we're treating the community as a mind, and then this later thing, well, this is a universal community that doesn't exist yet. Like, well, then how can it be a mind? Right. This almost does get mystical. It would have to be the Mind of God that unifies everybody or something. You know, it'd have to go a more, I would say, Hegelian direction. I did read the part of the intro where he says, I'm really not a Hegelian. I really like Charles Sanders Peirce way more than I like Hegel.

And I've read a lot of Hegel and I respect Hegel. So I'm not just saying that because, you know, out of some sort of fear of the Europeans or something like that. But still, it's hard not to see. To use this with his very clear language. These are lectures as a way of untangling the impossibly dense weird stuff we see in Hegel.

13:31 Wes: The word mystical for him, he associates with this melding of individuals into each other as well as an associated. Right Buddhist lack of self and therefore lack of desire. But individuality is important to him because an essential part of the community is discrete individuals who do have desires and also do have love and loyalty and love the community. So I think he's consistently anti mystical in that sense. He doesn't just want everything to individuals to merge into each other. Mark, I'm a little confused about what you see as mystical later. Later on, other than the religious element, you know.

14:07 Mark: Yes. Well, I think he talks about this, that we have the mystical urge, at least in the Christian community, that it's not just loving each other. Me loving you as an individual is that there's. So I think it's sort of like the Aristophanes that in. In love you want to merge with the other. That he talks about this briefly. I'd have to find the passage when we get to it an hour and a half from now. Yeah. Even though you're right, he says explicitly that it is not a merging of minds in this particular kind of community driven by love, there is like, again, like Aristophanes, the desire to merge minds.

So it's. It's mystical in that sense and it's also mystical in the sense that it is hopeful that this community, this universal community is aspirational. It does not actually exist. Yet not everybody in the world is a Christian. Not everybody, you know, so you can claim everybody is part of this community whether. Whether we want to or not. And he, he a few times in the book compares this says this is sort of an improvement over Roman stoicism. So if you think of Marcus Aurelius, just the idea of seeing yourself as a member of not this nation, that nation, but the universal community of man and acting as if everything is acting in one big system for the benefit of everything else.

And Marcus even had this idea of fate. And so you don't have to. Other people, they might be confused. They don't identify with this massive machine that is the world, but they're members of it nonetheless. So Christianity is, you know, a form of that.

15:39 Seth: All right, so you're like 40 miles down the road.

15:43 Mark: Yes. Let's just trying to overview before we.

15:46 Seth: Yeah, please. I mean, let's remember what the problem statement here is. And literally the book is called the Problem of Christianity. Well, what's the problem with Christianity from his perspective? So he establishes there are individuals and there are communities. Christianity is a community. In order for me to talk about what the problem of Christianity is going to be, I have to kind of establish my concept of community and the relationship between individuals and communities. So that's what he does in the beginning, is then he's going to talk a lot about what communities look like, can communities have a history, etc.

Like, how does it work? And then he's going to say kind of what differentiates Christianity from other sorts of things. And by the way, a group of people working together is not necessarily a community. They have to buy into it somehow. They have to feel shared commonality. Right. And have shared experiences and things like that in order for it to be a community. So before we get too far along, let's lay a little bit of that groundwork and make sure we understand why he's trying to solve that problem. Because I think what he says about community is really interesting and I think has a lot of validity.

And then what he says about Christian community, I think is the part that's scary to me.

16:54 Mark: But yes, yes, it's hard to get a handle on. But if you say this is the whole purpose of the book is to define what a Christian community is, I mean, I guess that's the reason maybe why. Why you didn't. Besides this arbitrary page restriction link that I gave you about why we didn't sort of read the beginning and the end of the book to actually see what his project is as opposed to this thing that we could potentially pull out and use for other purposes.

17:20 Kara: You're asking, like, what is his project in the book?

17:23 Mark: I mean, that was what I was trying to point at, but I think I just made it more complicated.

17:27 Kara: Okay, yeah, yeah, no, his. His project is that, you know, he wants to talk about how a community, in particular the concept of like an infinite community of interpretation, be this thing that is eternal, can become this thing that it gives meaning and become this thing that people actually develop their own individuality within. But it is this uniting sense that, yeah, it doesn't exist yet, but goes both into the past and into the future. So it becomes something that is not restricted by time.

18:08 Mark: And I think importantly is that this is very different from. We talked about Orwell's nationalism. This is something that comes up again and again and, oh, maybe community identity. There's something exclusive. And you. You define your community by deciding that there are some outsiders that are not in the community. But according to him, that's not what a true community is. A true community recognizes its connections to other communities. Just the fact that the very fact of the glue that unites you to your communities, he's going to say, is loyalty.

And so once you are a loyal person, you will recognize other loyal people. I really like my team, but I recognize that you really like your team. And instead of just having a hate relation like lots of rival teams do, we will say we are actually in a community together of people that. Like baseball or football or whatever. The thing is. And sort of, there's a sort of. There's a natural expansionist characteristic of membership in a community that makes us think that they are all tending towards a universal community. As you were just saying, saying.

Going further and saying it's eternal. Like, this is. This is getting more and more weird for me.

19:16 Wes: Yeah, we haven't really said what loyalty is, and we're talking about the progression.

19:20 Mark: Okay.

19:20 Wes: What he calls primitive loyalty or tribal loyalty. Tribal loyalty to something like religion. You know, I like the connection to Orwell because I was making it as well. Loyalty is more like what Orwell calls patriotism, not nationalism, because nationalism means identifying with the superiority, the power and prestige of your community relative to some less prestigious and powerful group, relative to an inferior. And he understands that there can be something that he calls patriotism. And it, I think, is very much an analog to what Royce calls loyalty.

Although the danger, I think, you know, trying to define a legitimate community, there's always that nationalist in group, out group danger. So it's always a very interesting attendant problem. And it's very obviously there in. Right, what he calls primitive loyalty. So that could be loyalty to the family, the kind of loyalty that is predicated on natural, instinctual ties to other people. And many times it's unconscious. So familial love or love of one's own tribe, love of one's own nation. And it's the type of loyalty that comes into play with societies that are very Warlike.

And then the question is, well, how do we get this expansion to. Right. This is why stoicism is relevant. How do we get this expansion of the idea of these particular exclusionary communities to something that is more universal?

20:45 Kara: Yeah. And with this. So Royce's idea of loyalty to loyalty is essential here. So the concept of loyalty to loyalty is that glue. The idea that we have to not just have loyalty to whatever the individual specific community it is, let's say I have loyalty to my baseball team. Just me having loyalty to my baseball team is not going to make the connections that come out of that. A genuine community. Genuine communities have to be ones that have a relationship with loyalty to loyalty. And what loyalty to loyalty is, is a commitment to. To supporting other people, advancing their own loyalties.

It is not just, I want my community to go as far as it can. I want my community to be as great as possible. There has to be part of that that also supports other communities. At the same time, there has to be part of that that supports the loyalties that others hold, even if they're not my own loyalty. And the extent to which a community can participate in that, loyal to loyalty, the extent to which a community is growing, can join with other communities, can support the undertakings of other communities, is the extent to which it's going to be a living community, a genuine community, and aimed towards the beloved community, versus one that will be a dying community, which is going to be the ones that are going to be the ones that are warlike, which are going to be the ones that are going to be provincial, are going to be exclusionary.

So that's important.

22:31 Seth: Did we read this or are you telling us this? Because I didn't pick that up from anything. I didn't pick that up at all.

22:36 Wes: This is here in section six.

22:39 Kara: Well, loyalty to loyalty is also a concept that comes from his philosophy of loyalty book, right?

22:44 Mark: So that's 1908. And he says at the beginning of this book, like, hey, you don't have to read the other book. But I am building on those ideas, right?

22:50 Wes: So it's right Here in section 6, this idea of loyalty to loyalty. So we start, right, with a loyalty. This is kind of natural loyalty to our own community at one level or another, which means putting its interests above our own, naturally, in a sense, selfish and loyal to our own interests. And then this expands into a kind of enthusiasm for the qualities of the community, moral and aesthetic. So Mark brought up the example of chivalry, right? And this is his example. We can love the loyalty of the foe. So even if we're fighting an enemy in a war or in some form of battle, we can admire and we're loyal to our cause or to our country or to whatever it is, we can admire that same loyalty in the.

23:38 Seth: Oh, that's what you're talking about.

23:40 Wes: And this is. Yeah, this is what Kara's saying is the glue, the bridge, right to universalization. And then so on page 71 he's going to say we end up with a universal community or an ideal of a universal community of the loyal. So this is strangely enough how universalization is supposed to happen or how we can just even get that idea in the first place that we might expand the community to these others. We can expand it because we can identify with their own devotion to their own community. We don't just have to see it as an opposing force.

24:18 Seth: Okay, I would just like to point out, and I'm not usually this contrarian, Kara, but that is not what she said. And that's the way you're characterizing it, is not what he said. My perspective, what he says is I can see my loyalty to my group. I can see that the other individual who's not part of my group, who's part of it, sorry, community, who's part of another community. I can understand that they're loyal to their community and I can appreciate that.

24:46 Mark: So respect for loyalty.

24:47 Seth: It's a respect for loyalty and there's nothing in there. Especially when you're talking about two communities that are at war with each other. There's nothing in there about one community working to support the loyalty of the other. I don't want to derail, but that's. I just want to explain why I did not see that. I did not see that.

25:06 Wes: Let's read it then.

25:07 Seth: Okay, let's do it.

25:08 Wes: Let's read it out loud. Let's go to page 71. So on a more highly self conscious level, the loyal spirit tends to assume the form of chivalry. The really devoted and considerate warrior learns to admire the loyalty of his foe. Yes, even to depend upon it for some of his own best inspiration. Knighthood prizes the knightly spirit. The loyalty of the clansmen breeds by contagion a more intense loyalty in other clans. But at the same time it breeds a love for just such loyalty. Kindred clans learn to respect and ere long to share one another's loyalty.

The result is an ethical motive that renders the alliance and on occasion the union of various clans and nationalities not only a possibility but a conscious ideal. 72 in brief, loyalty is in the first, the practical faith of communities, viewed as units have a value which is superior to all other values and interests of detached individuals. The sort of loyalty which reaches the level of true chivalry, in which loves, the honor and loyalty of the stranger or even of the foe, tends either in company or with or apart from any further religious motive to lead men towards a conception of the brotherhood of all the loyal.

And then on the. Well, he uses this phrase the universal community of the loyal on 71 on the previous page.

26:21 Seth: Right, So I understand how that is supposed to get us to some sort of Kantian cosmopolitanism, but I'm just saying it didn't feel to me like he's saying oh, the community. When you understand loyalty, what you'll do is you'll help others facilitate their own loyalty and their own communities. And in fact your community will go to work to help facilitate that. He's trying to point towards cosmopolitanism ironically, in a way that seems to contradict in some ways his later definition of how communities work through the shared activities and shared experiences. Because all you have in common is loyalty and a kind of admiration for that loyalty.

27:00 Wes: So it becomes a basis for a system of values, right? Lead men towards a conception brotherhood of all the loyal and towards an estimation of all the values in life in terms of their relation to the service of a one ideally universal community. In other words, this is how we get morality. This is how we get the idea that you treat human beings in general in a certain way. Not just it's my tribe versus your tribe, help your friends, hurt your enemies. Right, Thrasymachus. You get a more universalized sense of the ethical through the extension of community.

27:36 Seth: This is how he says it's going to happen, or this is how the he says it does happen.

27:41 Wes: Well, it's there in Stoicism, for instance. It's there in Plato. The ideas have already occurred to human beings that it's not just help my friends, hurt my enemies, it's not just my community versus some other community, it's there's some basis for universalization.

27:57 Mark: I think you're just Seth pointing to the. The normative descriptive distinction that actual communities don't have a built in telos that they every time you get a community together it's going to join with neighboring like no, of course not. Not like. In fact, we're just as likely to just squabble forever. But normatively, the way Wes is. I hadn't actually thought of this as Straight up Kantian, utilitarian, any universalist ethics as having its source in the notion of community. That had me because, you know, for Kant, you know, you're thinking of your own reason and you are using an idea of like the kingdom of ends, which is the same as this universal community. But it just seemed more individualistic than what Royce is describing here. Yeah, I find this an interesting connection.

28:41 Seth: Totally. I'm on board with that and I appreciate the clarification and the instruction.

28:46 Wes: Yeah, I'm not suggesting that the opposing, you know, that enemies on the battlefield are having a World War I, Christmas time, all the time getting together and playing soccer and of course not. You know, I appreciate the irony or the interesting paradox involved in the idea that this kind of originally warlike sentiment, this sentiment which can be quite aggressive towards the other, loyalty to one's own, because this right is evocative of the problem of nationalism, that we can take that exclusionary sentiment and actually make it a basis for something more universal. And that's how we get out of our parochial predicament, let's say.

29:26 Mark: I did want to ask you guys what you thought right. In these sections, I think we've even quoted part of them regard just being involved in community, being an authentic member is means regarding its type of life, its form of being is essentially more worthy than his own. And then later, a couple pages later, he talks about loyalty as a solution for the problem of one's personal life. And without getting into sort of the St. Paul's particular take on human nature, what do you guys think about this? Like, is that what it is to be a member of a community? Because then I don't know that there are too many.

29:58 Seth: Well, this is kind of step one and where I was started to get nervous. So he's pretty clear that, like, first off, I agree 100%. Individuals don't spring full grown right from the head of Zeus. You require a community to develop into a human being. And we have to acknowledge that. And what he says is that he makes it sound somewhat like you can't accomplish anything meaningful in your life or give your life meaning without membership or participation in at least some community that as individuals we're just not capable. First of all, you can't have a fulfilling life if you're not social, if you're an ascetic.

Like, he would be one of those that would say, like, the ascetic life is no life. And I think that's, you know, I agree with that. But he makes it sound like, look, if you're going to have meaning in your life. You have to have projects and goals, accomplishments, activities. And he makes it sound like this is not something that you can do yourself or that you can self direct, that you need to have something outside of yourself, not metaphysically outside, but just socially outside. And you need a community that can give you direction and can give you purpose and can give you activities and tasks and things like that.

And so that's why that's the relationship of the individual to the community, the loyalty. Come.

31:23 Wes: Well, Mark, you mentioned this idea of a solution to the problem of personal life, which is on page 70. I think you were thinking of that specifically, right?

31:31 Mark: Yeah.

31:31 Wes: Let me just set it up a little bit because I think this is important. If his religion comes into touch with his loyalty, then his gods are the leaders of his community. And both the majesty and the harmony of the loyal life are thus increased. The loyal motives are not. Are thus not only moral, but also aesthetic. The community may be to the individual both beautiful and sublime. Deep seated then in human nature are the reasons that make loyalty appear to the individual as a solution for the problem of his personal life. And then two things here.

One is naturally, what is the problem of his personal life? What do we mean by that? And second, I just want to point out we're still at the premoral stage here of not a loyalty to a universal community, but a loyalty to our. Because he'll say, yet these motives tend still to higher and vaster conquests than we have here yet mentioned. Warlike tribes, et cetera, et cetera. And then he goes on to talk about universalization via loyalty to loyalty. So even before we get to the idea of a universal community, community per se and loyalty to it seems to be a solution to the problem of personal life.

So what is that problem and why is it a solution?

32:36 Mark: Yeah, I buy Seth's explanation of the meaning of life is invariably social. Sure. But Royce wants to go on and say it can't just be a matter of loving other individuals, which I think we as individualists, as existentialists might want to say. Yes, it is. I live for my family. I live for my. Not my family in the abstract, but my family, like these three individuals that I live with or whatnot. And concerns of like what is the larger community going to think? How do I rate according to the larger community's goals? Seems more shallow. But he is saying that actually the larger community is superior, you know, and that loyalty will give you a sense of purpose.

And it's very hard for me not to bring in what Paul later says about that we. I was comparing this to Kierkegaard, that we sort of as individuals are naturally very capricious, that we get entangled in all sorts of nonsense. And so having a community will ground us in a way that. That is the solution to the. So that's the problem with personal life, is that even in regards to our love for individuals, well, one day I love this person, the next day I love this person. And it doesn't end up giving you something consistent enough. It's solipsistic, essentially, even if it involves other people.

To really be grounded, to really bypass the private language concerns that we've discussed in so many of our episodes. You have to be connected to an actual community.

34:06 Wes: Yeah. He uses this word, fixity, Mark, I think is part of what you're getting at. This is page 69. There's a fixity that's part one, and then part two is there's a dignity to the motives and demands of the community, which individual motives and interests do not have. Right, Mark? As you're pointing out, they kind of vary. We have one interest and then we have another interest. And there's. So there's something that fascinates us about the idea of an interest or value which is not simply our own value. And that might not change from moment to moment.

And then the whole trajectory of this section is towards universalization. By the time we get to page 73, he evokes the concept of salvation. Right. We come to see the university, the community, as an instrument of our own salvation. So he'll say, I'm 73 to this community. In ideal, all men belong, this universal community. And to act as if one were a member of such a community is to win in the highest measure, the goal of individual life. It is to win what religion calls salvation. But I don't think it becomes that until we get a little bit down the road of universalization.

35:20 Mark: So, Kara, I really want to bring you into this because you recommended this reading to us. There must be something exciting about this idea of community or what? Yeah. Can you.

35:28 Kara: Well, I think that there might be an issue going on of mistaking what one thinks of by the term community in a colloquial sense, and what Royce might be talking about with community. So the idea of, well, I might just be loyal to my family, or I might just be loyal to, like, you know, this group of friends versus there's nothing necessarily that would make that any less of a community than, you know, Salt Lake City or Whatever. Our community should be aiming towards connections with other communities. Our community should be aiming towards this loyalty to loyalty.

But communities fundamentally are going to be defined as those things that we connect with as being our causes, those things that we connect with as being what we are loyal to. So that might be part of what's going on. You might need to be thinking about community in a bit of a different way than how we colloquially use the term.

36:34 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the place for this is page 169 where he makes this distinction between these two types of love and loyalty. So this is section two. One is what he calls natural or primitive, familial, tribal versus something that's more advanced, like Christianity. So yeah, I think this is where we get the distinction between the natural, what he calls the natural, and something that's more advanced like Christianity. And he uses that word advanced and

37:05 Mark: just, just to keep folks up with where we are in the book. So, yeah, we were, we had been talking to this point about Lecture 2, the idea of the universal community, just a few sections from that. And then we jump to lecture four, the Realm of Grace, which is going to sound, you know, by that title he is moving into talking more explicitly about the universal Christian community, but of course basing it on these more mundane types. But you're right, Kara, that I think I'm getting confused by the fact that the thing that he's ultimately shooting for in this book, the description of the Christian community is so, as Seth said, scary and abstract that it's hard for me to fully get the point of what he's actually saying about smaller communities.

Because even Wes, you just said the primitive loyalty to community versus something more advanced like Christianity. But what are some other advanced things that are not this particular weird thing? You know, we could talk about national community. And you know, the fact that I'm loyal to my city certainly doesn't make me not loyal to Wisconsin and therefore not loyal to America. Like, is that a way that community involvement can expand in this way, you know, or the kind of nested communities that we're talking about.

38:18 Wes: Yeah, and as we go along, you know, we'll get all these various criteria for community. He gets pretty granular about what he means and away from the more colloquial sense or the un analyzed sense. Right. So time process, for instance, and having a shared past, shared memories and even one's own memories. Right. It's just the communal memory of some great thing, for instance, that happened in the past that I, you and I share the founding Something to do with the Founding Fathers, for instance.

38:50 Seth: So let's bring that up because he first states that he talks about it in terms of the individual in the first volume, but it doesn't really fully get that the significance of what he says doesn't get fully meaning. And Kara referred to this in kind of her opening statement. So he says that you have to understand an individual is not in the present or not solely in the present, that an individual has a future and a past. And an individual is not simply a thing that is presented, it's an interpretation. What you as yourself, yourself, is an interpretation of your past and your projections into the future.

You know, he talks about your memory of past experiences and how you make sense of them and how that constitutes how you see yourself in the present is remarkably sophisticated. And I mean, considering when he was writing, I would think somewhat. Somewhat advanced. I mean, I don't think we got that level of sophistication and interpretation of personality and self and ego, you know, until later, or maybe he's in a contemporary time period. But anyway.

40:02 Wes: Well, it's kind of evocative of Locke on personal identity. Right. And its basis in memory. And we get the most sophisticated expansion on that in Parfit later on.

40:11 Seth: Yeah.

40:12 Wes: People could listen to our Parfit episodes, to the role of memory and personal identity.

40:16 Seth: Yeah, the role of memory, of course, underserved in this podcast, I suppose, in philosophy in general. But basically, self is interpretation with the aid of memory and also with the aid of hope, I think he calls it, or at least something. Basically, you interpret yourself on the basis of your own past and your anticipation and projection into the future. And then we're going to come to find that community also has this component of time that's really critical. And as you said, Wes, there's shared experiences, shared events, or memory of a. You can call it a memory might be an understanding, an interpretation, but the relationship of the individual to the community is interpretation.

And a big part of what he's trying to do here. Right. Is to talk about how brilliant Paul was in the way that he structured a framework for interpretation for Christians so that they maintained this continuity and it wasn't all fluctuating and all that, but I think that idea that self identity is interpretation, and I guess we could say loyalty or participation in community also involves a heavy element of interpretation and memory. And all that is also really, really interesting.

41:32 Mark: Yeah, some of this made me want to read some more Ricoeur on the way that we interpret our lives. I know this is another guy Sort of talking in this area. Of course, if we're going to say that community is a mind and it's a human mind, it doesn't have qualia. Right. Just like it doesn't have a body, it doesn't have individual qualia. The qualia are distributed among the various people in it. So you might want to say, well then it's not a mind. And this struck me as behaviorist initially seeing it. We recognize even in individuals, we recognize others minds by their characteristics, by their behavior, by their intellectual products. Right. The things they say, the things they do. Well, we can do that with communities as well. And so and especially if we say if you're focusing on qualia and saying this is what makes a mind a mind, well, that's the, what Royce calls the momentary self.

42:19 Wes: Right.

42:20 Mark: That, that is not the self over time. The self over time is not all clearly necessarily, you know, you're not thinking of all your memories at one time. The continuity of memory is something I don't even. I think this is post Lockean in an interesting way because I think there's still the sort of image that you have is that I right now remember my past and well, I might not remember all the past, but at least the past me remembers the past and. Right, right. This is, I think what Parfit starts improving on Locke. But if you then just sort of don't worry about the consciousness part of it, worry just about sort of what is the evidence that you remember something, that you have it in mind, that you have it as part of your personal path. Well, it's just based on what you tell people it's based on. This is still sounding very behaviorist to me. So I think I've talked myself in a circle.

43:07 Wes: Should we look at the text here? This is section 10 of community and time process in the second volume around page 40.

43:14 Mark: Well, you know what, I think we should do that at the beginning of our second part here because it's time to stop. But folks can hear that next week or if you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, it should be the next thing in your feed that partiallyexaminedlife.com support. And we really want to thank Kara Barnett for joining us for the first half of the discussion here. She had to just jump off a few minutes ago. Thanks everybody.

43:37 Wes: Thank you.